quotations about reality
Reality is not a fad That changes with the latest whim.
DAVID EDWIN HALL
"Rejoicing in Reality", Quiet Time Poems
A fundamental value in the scientific outlook is concern with the best available map of reality. The scientist will always seek a description of events which enables him to predict most by assuming least. He thus already prefers a particular form of behavior. If moralities are systems of preferences, here is at least one point at which science cannot be said to be completely without preferences. Science prefers good maps.
ANATOL RAPOPORT
Science and the Goals of Man: a study in semantic orientation
I am prepared to accept from others their own version of reality. I think it is a basic freedom really, to create one's own reality from whatever truths are available.
JOSEPHINE HART
Damage
There are some things that just have to be whether they are or not, have to be a damn sight more than some other things that are and it don't matter a damn whether they are or not.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
Absalom, Absalom!
By changing your mind, you change everything.
PATANJALI
The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali
Between certainty and the real, an ancient enmity.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
"Against Certainty"
Doth the reality of sensible things consist in being perceived? or, is it something distinct from their being perceived, and that bears no relation to the mind?
GEORGE BERKELEY
Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous
Reality is a formless lure,
And only when we know this
Do we dare to be unreal.
MAXWELL BODENHEIM
"Dialogue Between a Past and Present Poet"
Without poetry, reality is speechless.
DELMORE SCHWARTZ
Selected Poems (1938-1958): Summer Knowledge
I've never felt Truth was Beauty. Never. I've always felt that people can't take too much reality. I like being in Ingmar Bergman's world. Or in Louis Armstrong's world. Or in the world of the New York Knicks. Because it's not this world. You spend your whole life searching for a way out. You just get an overdose of reality, you know, and it's a terrible thing. I'm always fighting against reality.
WOODY ALLEN
attributed, Show and Tell: New Yorker Profiles
There is that might-have-been which is the single rock we cling to above the maelstrom of unbearable reality.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
Absalom, Absalom!
The world could only be known as it existed in men's hearts. For while it seemed a place which contained men it was in reality a place contained within them.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
The Crossing
O the heart has dreams Elysian!
That steal o'er it calm and sweet,
Hushing pain like a magician
Who binds spirits at his feet.
WALTER RICHARD CASSELS
"Reality", Eidolon, or the Course of a Soul and Other Poems
Whatever reality is, it's not that.
HERMAN NORTHROP FRYE
The Anatomy of Criticism
Reality is frequently inaccurate.
DOUGLAS ADAMS
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Reality is subject to the mind's creation.
DIANE STEIN
Essential Reiki
Absolute reality is and always will be unknowable to us.
LEENA KROHN
"Cracking the Codes of Leena Krohn", The New Yorker, January 13, 2016
The angel of reality is unknowable, a figure only partially apprehended, then transformed into something else in continuous movement--here and then gone.
DAVID MICHAEL HERTZ
Angels of Reality
Reality, n. The dream of a mad philosopher. That which would remain in the cupel if one should assay a phantom. The nucleus of a vacuum.
AMBROSE BIERCE
The Devil's Dictionary
A few years ago the city council of Monza, Italy, barred pet owners from keeping goldfish in curved goldfish bowls. The measure's sponsor explained the measure in part by saying that it is cruel to keep a fish in a bowl with curved sides because, gazing out, the fish would have a distorted view of reality. But how do we know we have the true, undistorted picture of reality? Might not we ourselves also be inside some big goldfish bowl and have our vision distorted by an enormous lens? The goldfish's picture of reality is different from ours, but can we be sure it is less real?
STEPHEN HAWKING & LEONARD MLODINOW
The Grand Design